Today at CES, Toshiba became the next PC OEM to put out a system powered by Google’s Chrome OS. Its new 13-inch Chromebook was first teased a couple months ago alongside a few other Haswell-powered Chromebooks, but now we know all the details about the $279 laptop.

On the inside, the laptop's dual-core Celeron CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB SSD put it on the same level as the other Haswell Chromebooks—perhaps a little less desirable than some of the 4GB models, but Chrome OS isn't as RAM-hungry as a more complex desktop operating system. The laptop also uses solid-state storage, includes dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, and comes with a decent collection of ports (two USB 3.0, one HDMI, one card reader). Nine hours of battery life is also promised, roughly in line with what we've seen from other recent Chromebooks.

Where Toshiba hopes to differentiate itself from the pack is in screen size, which at 13.3 inches is appreciably larger than the 11-inch screens in devices like HP's Chromebook 11 or Acer's C720. Though the display uses the same 1366×768 resolution as the smaller Chromebooks, Toshiba believes the larger onscreen elements will be better for productivity. At just over three pounds, it's also about a pound lighter than HP's larger Chromebook 14, so it may be a good compromise for those of you looking for something that's larger while still being relatively light.

Aside from the fact that it looks almost exactly like MacBook Air, I notice the gloss border gently flows from the screen onto the top and bottom frame as if they're made from glass, too. Is this the case?

At least this Chromebook looks fairly nice. Shame that the screen is only 1366x768, 1600x900 would have been nice at this screen size, but I guess sacrifices have to be made at $279. How about a 4GB 1600x900 version at $329 Toshiba?

$279 is *still* too expensive for a Chromebook. I like the Chromebooks a lot, but with full-on Windows notebooks (with better hardware specs!) often selling for $300 (Asus in particular sells a good one for that price), it's a tough sell.

They need to get the Chromebooks down to $200 or so. I don't know if that's possible, though.

I'm getting one for my 9 year old. They use chromebooks in class, and he submits all his reports in google docs.

It's a dead simple OS to use that's not vulnerable to all the messiness that comes with a windows (or even a mac) laptop. It's really fast, light on the resources, and I've been really impressed with the hardware $200 - $300 buys. I can't say that for equivalent windows laptops.

I also have a mac laptop and a high-end windows workstation in my house. I wouldn't buy a chromebook as a primary computer, but it's terrific as a supplemental computer, and way better for content creation than an equivalently priced tablet.

The Chromebook looks good and has an alright price tag, but I'm far more interested in the other big item they showed off. I think I'm at the point with Chromebooks where my eyes just go "more of the same." especially when I can simply buy a T100 for a bit more. Yes, it has what I'm assuming is a worse keyboard, but I've got Windows. I guess the bigger deal is the size here? I'm just not feeling anything really unique on this one. That's not a bad thing! I just see nothing screaming at me to upgrade with it is all. The old Acer and Samsung duo still stand out.

Meanwhile at CES my eyes are on the 8" 1600x1200 Windows tablet by Lenovo* instead. Pricier but sexier.

Microsoft could combat Chromebooks with cheap RT netbooks. But I guess Microsoft isn't ready yet to lower the price of RT enough for that. They can't really lower the price until Bing starts to make real money to make up for it.

I'm writing this post on a brand new Macbook Air I like very much, but I suspect the Toshiba Chromebook would satisfy me too. Specifically: I do not play games or edit video.

I'm going to try and convince my son to try the Toshiba as a replacement for his 5 year old MacBook. Most of his personal computing happens on a phone, while the computer is used for Linux based scientific programming. The easy flip into Linux is perfect.

[podium]I cannot shake the impression that the lion's share of the comments I see complaining about poor specs are from people that either 1. play hardware intensive games; or 2. are victims or MS bloat. [/podium]I for one am happy to see movement away from power hungry CPUs that can serve anybody (until the next MS bloatware comes out, anyway) to optimized Linux computers that serve 95% of the non-gaming population very well. My wish list is really pared down to a higher resolution screen and more RAM.